In person identification as an anticrime measure, when a newly captured image is matched with an image captured in advance, processing for associating the same person in the two images is sometimes performed. Also, in a flow line analysis of a person, processing for associating the same person in the two images captured by two cameras is sometimes performed. In such processing, a still image or a video is used.
In a flow line analysis, association is carried out using images of the entire body of a person, and various parts of the body is used as features. In this case, the features of individual parts are extracted from the two images and used for comparison, and it is possible to consider a most similar person as the same person based on the similarity degrees of the features.
A pattern identification method for identifying an input pattern of an image, or the like using a binary tree table is disclosed in Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 4-112391, for example. In this pattern identification method, a feature vector is generated from the input pattern, and pattern identification is performed by referencing a binary tree table regarding the pattern predicted as a candidate category provided in advance from this feature vector.
An image segmentation method for segmenting an image of a human body into parts is disclosed, for example, in D. Qin, Q. Jianzhong, L. Fang, S. Xiangbin, D. Qin and Y. Hongping, “A Human Body Part Segmentation Method Based on Markov Random Field,” International Conference on Control Engineering and Communication Technology (ICCECT), 2012.